Agriculture

Obtained from Lettuce

/ Agriculture, Texts

Lettuce Face

At last I tired of bread and water, got on my good behavior, and took to reading. The prison had a splendid library, not a worthless book in it. All the best English authors were there and I went through them hungrily. I became so immersed in reading that I was careful not to break the rules lest I lose three days or more from my books. I got schoolbooks and studied them. Remembering my poor arithmetic, I tried mathematics but couldn't get anywhere. Then the grammar, but the rules seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to confuse the beginner and "repress his noble rage," so I gave that up, got intensely interested in a small dictionary, and almost went into the dark cell for carrying it out with me to work and looking into it when the guard's back was turned. I read the best books in the library, except the Bible, and would have taken that only I already had six months with it in the Scotchman's jail.

I went through Chambers's Encyclopedia from A to Z. Read all about acids and paper, metals and metallurgy, dies and molds. I studied the history of locks and lockmaking, poring over the pictures of locks and their escutcheons -- all kinds of locks and keys, door locks, padlocks, combination locks, nothing was neglected. I read a most interesting paper on picklocks and lock-picking by a famous lock-maker of London. I followed the history of explosives from gunpowder down to nitroglycerin. I found a passage that old clearly and concisely which explosives did the greatest damage and made the least noise. What a mine of information! I was fascinated. I studied guns and pistols, drills and saws and files, braces and bits and drilling machines of high and low pressure and fast or slow motion.

I investigated poisons, herbs, and drugs. I discovered that the finest quality of morphine may be obtained from lettuce and proved it in the prison garden by extracting it and eating it. I read up on sleeping and dreaming and learned just what kind of noise is most apt to wake a sleeping person; just when he sleeps the deepest and at what hour of the night his courage is at the lowest ebb. I can sit in a hotel lobby today and pick out the sound sleeper, the medium sleeper, and light sleeper. I got it out of the encyclopedia, and proved it in practice later.

Jack Black, You Can't Win (Edinburgh, UK: AK Press/Nabat, 2000), 189-190.

Suppose I Take This Ludicrous Little Radish . . .

/ Agriculture, Texts

Ludicrous Little Radish

"But what about that big radish? You see it, don't you? Right there in the palm of your hand? And the little one? You see it too, don't you? Stunted! Dwarfed! This miserable puny radish! . . . A radish is a perfectly simple matter, isn't it? No, it's not simple? Ah, you disarm me! . . . And a giant radish, Ferdinand? Imagine an enormous radish! . . . Say as big as your head! . . . Suppose I take this ludicrous little radish and blow it up to enormous size with telluric blasts . . . Well? Like a balloon! Ah? And suppose I make a hundred thousand of them . . . a hundred thousand radishes! More and more voluminous! . . . And each year as many as I please . . . Five hundred thousand . . . enormous radishes! . . . As big as pears . . . As big as pumpkins! . . . Radishes such as nobody has ever seen! . . . Why, it's automatic . . . I eliminate the small radish . . . I wipe small radishes off the face of the earth! . . . I corner the market, I erect a monopoly! All your measly undersized vegetables are finished! Unthinkable! Through! All these baubles! These small-fry! No more tiny bunches! No more piddling shipments! If they keep, it's only by miracle . . . It's wasteful, my friend . . . anachronistic . . . shameful! . . . Enormous radishes, that's what I want to see! And here's our slogan: The future belongs to the radish . . . my radish . . . And what's going to stand in my way? My market? The whole world! . . . Is my radish nutritious? Tremendously! . . . Radish flour is fifty percent richer than the other kind . . . 'Radicious bread' for the army! . . . Far superior to all the wheat in Australia! . . . The analyses bear me out! . . . Well what do you think of it? . . . Is it beginning to dawn on you? You're not interested! Neither is she . . . But I am . . . If I devote myself to the radish . . . I'm only taking the radish as an example, I might have chosen the turnip . . . . But let's take the radish! The shock value will be greater. So there you are! I'm going into it! To the hilt! . . . to the hilt, do you hear . . . You catch my meaning?"

-- Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, tr. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions, 1966), 467-68.

The Day the Clowns Cried

/ Agriculture

 Sparkle wrote to tell me "My mother had to be forced to tell us about it even in her 70's, and she was in her early 20's when it happened."

This appears to be the case with most of the eyewitnesses. When I asked Joey Kelly, grandson of eyewitness Emmett "Weary Willie" Kelly Sr., if he could share some special insights from his grandfather on the story. His reply was "Sorry, It was one of those things he (Emmett Sr.) blocked out and didn't like to talk about for reasons I'm sure you can appreciate."

Nevertheless, I was able to locate a few comments about that day  from Emmett Sr. as he was quoted in the book The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan and Emmett Sr.'s own words from his autobiography entitled Clown. O'Nan reaffirmed Joey's statement about his grandfather's hesitance to relive that terrible day with this quote from Emmett Sr:

Emmett “Weary Willie” Kelly, Sr."I think of it, it's like a movie running in my mind. I try to forget it. I don't like to talk much about it."

In his autobiography, Emmett Sr. said, "I felt as though I had lived a lifetime in the seven minutes of that calamity." He also called it "...the most awful seven or eight minutes in the whole history of circus business."

Cocklebur

/ Agriculture

Cocklebur

Every time you plant your feet upon the snow you press down thousands of seeds, minute forms of life, each with its little store of starch or albumen, carefully compounded in Nature’s laboratory, sufficient to sustain the embryonic life until the tiny plantlet learns to draw nourishment from the breast of Mother Earth and to breathe health and vigor from the sunshine and the air. By the wayside, in stony places, among thorns and on good ground, Nature sows her seeds with lavish hand. Every tree and shrub and herb, itself held fast to one place, tries to give its offspring as great a start in the world as possible. Even in late February one may see some of Nature’s airships, designed to carry seeds. They are all built on the same principle, not to rise in the air, but to fly as far away from the tree as possible when falling from the branch. The basswood puts its seeds into little hollow wooden balls, then makes a sail out of a leaf and sets it at just the right angle to balance the seeds and catch the breeze. The winged samaras of the ash and the box elder are other modifications of the same principle. The round balls of the sycamore hang till the high winds of March loosen their strong stalks and then they break open and the club-shaped nutlets inside spread their bristly hairs to the breeze. The hop-like strobiles of the hop hornbeam seem especially made to blow over the surface of the frozen snow; they drop off the queer little oblong bags as they go and thus the smooth small nuts inside are planted. The oaks, hickories, walnuts, butternuts, hazelnuts, trust their fruits to the feet of passersby and to the squirrels and blue jays which fail to find many of their buried acorns and nuts. The big three-valved balloons of the bladdernut can sail either in the air, on the water, or over the frozen snow. The pretty clusters of the wild yam, seen climbing over the hazelbrush in the rich winter woods, have two ways of navigating in the wind; either the three-sided, papery capsule floats as a whole, or it splits through the winged angles and then the flat seeds with their membranaceous wings have a chance to flutter a foot or two away where haply they may find a square inch of unoccupied soil. The desmodium, the bidens, the agrimony and the cocklebur, which stick to your clothes even as late as February, are only using you as a Moses to lead their children to their promised land. These herb stalks above the snow, the corymbose heads of the yarrow, the spikes of the self-heal, the crosiers of the golden-rod, the panicles of the asters, the racemes of the Indian tobacco, the knotted threads of the blue vervain and the plantain, the miniature mandarin temples of the peppergrass — all these have shed, or are shedding, myriads of seeds to be silently sepulchred under the snow until earth’s easter April mornings. The withered berries of the bittersweet, the cat-brier, and the sumac, like the drupes of the early fall, are scattered far and wide by the birds. All these speak not of death, but of an eager, expectant life.

– Frederick John Lazell, Some Winter Days in Iowa (1907)